Eight Little Piggies by Stephen Jay Gould Read Free Book Online Page B

Similarly, recovery from mass extinction takes its natural measure in millions of years—as much as 10 million or more for fully rekindled diversity after major catastrophic events.
    These are the natural time scales of evolution and geology on our planet. But what can such vastness possibly mean for our legitimately parochial interest in ourselves, our ethnic groups, our nations, our cultural traditions, our blood lines? Of what conceivable significance to us is the prospect of recovery from mass extinction 10 million years down the road if our entire species, not to mention our personal lineage, has so little prospect of surviving that long?
    Capacity for recovery at geological scales has no bearing whatever upon the meaning of extinction today. We are not protecting Mount Graham Red Squirrels because we fear for global stability in a distant future not likely to include us. We are trying to preserve populations and environments because the comfort and decency of our present lives, and those of fellow species that share our planet, depend upon such stability. Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught in the throes of their power. At the appropriate scale of our lives, we are just a species in the midst of such a moment. And to say that we should let the squirrels go (at our immediate scale) because all species eventually die (at geological scales) makes about as much sense as arguing that we shouldn’t treat an easily curable childhood infection because all humans are ultimately and inevitably mortal. I love geological time—a wondrous and expansive notion that sets the foundation of my chosen profession—but such vastness is not the proper scale of my personal life.
    The same issue of scale underlies the main contribution that my profession of paleontology might make to our larger search for an environmental ethic. This decade, a prelude to the millennium, is widely and correctly viewed as a turning point that will lead either to environmental perdition or stabilization. We have fouled local nests before and driven regional faunas to extinction, but we were never able to unleash planetary effects before this century’s concern with nuclear fallout, ozone holes, and putative global warming. In this context, we are searching for proper themes and language to express our environmental worries.
    I don’t know that paleontology has a great deal to offer, but I would advance one geological insight to combat a well-meaning, but seriously flawed (and all too common), position and to focus attention on the right issue at the proper scale. Two linked arguments are often promoted as a basis for an environmental ethic:
    1. We live on a fragile planet now subject to permanent derailment and disruption by human intervention;
    2. Humans must learn to act as stewards for this threatened world.
    Such views, however well intentioned, are rooted in the old sin of pride and exaggerated self-importance. We are one among millions of species, stewards of nothing. By what argument could we, arising just a geological microsecond ago, become responsible for the affairs of a world 4.5 billion years old, teeming with life that has been evolving and diversifying for at least three-quarters of this immense span. Nature does not exist for us, had no idea we were coming, and doesn’t give a damn about us. Omar Khayyam was right in all but his crimped view of the earth as battered, when he made his brilliant comparison of our world to an eastern hotel:
    Think, in this battered caravanserai
    Whose portals are alternate night and day,
    How sultan after sultan with his pomp
    Abode his destined hour, and went his way.
    This assertion of ultimate impotence could be countered if we, despite our late arrival, now held power over the planet’s future. But we don’t, despite popular misperception of our might. We are virtually powerless over the earth at our planet’s own geological timescale.